Last week, we honed in on your business’ “one thing” and how it defines your Driving Critical Success Factor (DCSF).

How does your DCSF address the Red Queen syndrome?

Red Queen syndrome – “It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”

Your DCSF provides the beacon to keep coming back to as you evaluate opportunities and make decisions. As Stephen Covey advises, Put First Things First. That is, focus on importance rather than urgency (<- tweet this!). Your DCSF provides you with the mechanism to focus on what is important. It prevents the tyranny of the urgent.

To illustrate this, consider an example of how your DCSF can help your decision making. The DCSF in this example is to break into the pharmaceuticals industry. If your executive team is trying to decide which new modules to add to your product, the DCSF would help prioritize features that would benefit the pharma industry. You might say that you meet with your management team all the time and they are already aligned with your most important priority – your Driving Critical Success Factor. If that’s the case, that’s great. But in our experience, many business owners would not be able to say that.

But let’s go a step further which illustrates how the DCSF can truly impact your business. It can drive your DCSF down to the day-to-day decisions of every employee in your organization. For example, one of your telemarketers might be on the phone speaking with a prospect who is a consultant. The telemarketer finds out that the consultant works in the pharma industry. They have a good rapport on the phone. The telemarketer explains how their product could apply to pharma and asks whether the consultant could provide an introduction to one of their customers.

Having a DCSF and ensuring that all of your employees are aware of it can have an amazing impact on your business. Without it, you probably felt like your employees are out of sync with your priorities and that it is all up to you to make your priority happen. The beauty of a DCSF is that now every one of your employees is making day-in and day-out decisions that are aligned with your key priority.